The problem with Tekpub…
I like Rob Conery. But he is the sort of guy who just seems to go out of his way to cause trouble…
A good example is a post I wrote a couple of years ago.
What’s funny is that Rob even commented on the post. But unfortunately he missed the point. Rob is a classic “Ready, Fire, AIM!” type of person.
Case in point, I recently purchased a 12 month Tekpub subscription. (Tekpub is an online technical education resource).
Now a 12 month subscription for a little under $300 is good value. It’s competitors are either Youtube videos or companies like Plural Sight.
Last week, Rob posted this tweet:
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Awesome! So why did I pay full price?
But that’s ok, Rob’s a good bloke! So I pinged him, asked if I could get a 29% extension, sent my Order Number (twice), followed him up…
And then? Well not much!
I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe he has updated my subscription? Maybe he hasn’t. Funny thing is that Tekpub doesn’t show when your subscription ends, just when you signed up.
I’ll keep you posted…
Home Theater PC
Recently Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, updated his Home Theater PC. I had been thinking of doing the same, so below is my experience.
| CPU | Intel Core i3-2100 |
| Motherboard | MSi H67MA-E45 |
| Memory | Kingston 4GB DDR3 |
Standard case + power supply. I also added a 2TB hard drive + a Blueray writer.
Total damage: $800
Originally I installed Windows 7 Home Premium but had a few driver problems.
So I started again with Windows 7 Home Premium N and no problems.
How does it rate next to Jeffs’? 
Jeff managed a 5.1 – but I agree, take out the Aero desktop support and you have a 5.8 machine!
Interesting, Jeff got me all inspired when he started to talk about power consumption. He has been writing about this for sometime now. When I tested this machine, it was just under 40 watts.
I have no idea how Jeff pulled off 22 watts, but he did say that he recycled old parts from a previous build.
I’m not too worried since a) this machine will be either in stand-by or turned off when not in use and b) a low power consumption device is going to increase the cost significantly.
For well under $AUD1,000 I’m only annoyed I didn’t do this sooner!
When a dirty job is a good job
I was doing some research on Simon Sinek. He writes for AskMen.com and I came across their Top 10 TED Talks.
I came across this little gem. It’s a talk by Mike Rowe, from the Dirty Jobs show.
I won’t steal his thunder, just watch:
git, Windows 7 & error: error setting certificate verify locations:
Very annoying!
I’ve been trying different version control systems for sometime now and I just couldn’t get git on Windows to work.
I was constantly getting:
$ git fetch “https://some.website.com”
error: error setting certificate verify locations:
CAfile: /bin/curl-ca-bundle.crt
CApath: none
while accessing https://some.website.com/info/refs
fatal: HTTP request failed
I found the solution here.
- Open Notepad with Administrator privileges
- Open the file gitconfig. For me, this was in the folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc
- The line “sslCAinfo = /bin/curl-ca-bundle.crt” is using relative references. Change this to “sslCAinfo = C:/Program Files (x86)/Git/bin/curl-ca-bundle.crt”
Too easy!
Where is tsadmin.exe?
On Windows 2003, you can easily open Terminal Services Manager by clicking Start / Run / typing tsadmin [enter]
On Windows Server 2008 things are a little different. I found this post on Scott Forsyth’s blog:
This doesn’t work in Windows Server 2008 anymore. The change is ever so slight. In Windows Server 2003 the tool was tsadmin.exe, so typing ‘tsadmin’ was all that was required to start the tool. Now, in Windows Server 2008, this has been moved to a MMC snap-in and is called tsadmin.msc (plus tsadmin.dll is used silently).
So to fix this, click Start / Run / type tsadmin.msc [enter] and you’re good to go!
.Net 4, VS 2010, Entity Framework & mysql
An update to this Stackoverflow question and to these posts.
To use the Entity Framework with Mysql on VS2010 you need to download the mysql .net connector.
Download 6.3.2 (beta) and install!
Too easy!